The latest new gTLD  to hit the market, .ICU, entered General Availability this afternoon (May 29, 2018) at 2pm (U.S. Eastern Time). Domains in the new extension from Luxembourg-based ShortDot SA are now available at over 100 registrars in more than 30 countries around the world. 

Pricing varies from low standard rates upward through several premium levels. A quick spot check at a few registrars showed some attractive opening day pricing - just $1.49 for standard rate domains at Dynadot for example. The next level up (which includes a lot of one word and 3-letter domains) seemed to fall in the $15 range with Uniregistry selling  those at $13.20 ( for the most sought after keywords there were much larger jumps at all registrars we checked which has become standard operating procedure in the new gTLD world).

Kopas added, "The program has already gained several participants, including TottenhamHotspur.icu, a site supported by the English Football Club. This domain markets a Football camp in Italy with FA and UEFA-qualified coaches for boys and girls ages 8-16. Pia Jensen, who manages the parent business, Italian Tours, says "we are excited to become a 'Pioneer' because it will allow us to improve our messaging and reach more kids and parents."

The management team and board of directors at .ICU is comprised of domain industry veterans Lars Jensen, Kevin Kopas, Mogens Nielsen and Michael Riedl and the registry uses CentralNic as its backend service provider.

NamesCon held their 2nd annual NamesCon India conference Wednesday (May 23, 2018) as part of the larger Cloudfest India event held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Mumbai (Cloudfest, formerly known as World Hosting

Days, is NamesCon's parent company). The well-received one-day event kicked off what will be an extraordinarily busy string of domain conferences around the world that will stretch from now into the early fall.

Cloudfest/NamesCon CEO Soeren Von Varchmin onstage at their latest event at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Mumbai, India this week.

NamesCon has two more conferences coming up next month alone! They will run the 10th anniversary edition of the Domaining Europe conference (that has been rechristened NamesCon Europe) with show founder Dietmar Stefitz in Valencia, Spain June 7-9, then will go half way around the globe for the annual NamesCon China conference coming up June 28-29 in Shanghai.

Befitting its status as a global domain industry powerhouse, China has multiple high level conferences now, including the annual Global Domain Summit coming up next week - running June 1-2 at the Swiss Grand Hotel in Xiamen. GDS is co-organized by Ali Cloud, Baidu Cloud, Bizcn, Blockchain Planet and other well-known companies. Our friend George Hong (from popular brokerage Guta.com), who is well-known on both sides of the Pacific, will be there and will fill us in on how this year's event unfolds.

If you need another good reason to go Chelly added, "We've chose June 21 as the date because it's one of the best days of the year in Paris thanks to the Music Fest (Fête de la Musique) that will be going on. All day and night long, thousands of musicians play their instruments and sing in the streets, bars, concert halls and other venues."

After a brief respite in July, the conference circuit heats back up in August with the 5th annual DomainX conference in India the first one out of the gate that month. They will run August 4-5, 2018 in New Delhi. We attended this event when it was held in Bangalore in 2015 and Co-Founders Manmeet Pal Singh and Gaurav Kohli and their team put on an excellent show that has continued to grow each year, helping boost the industry in one of the world's fastest growing domain markets. 

Domain brokerage and consultancy GGRG.com has released their latest free quarterly report (.PDF file) breaking down aftermarket sales and development of "liquid domain names" in the 1st quarter of 2018. GGRG defines liquid domains as  being very short .com domains consisting of all letters (L) or all numbers (N), as well as 3-character (C) .coms that have a  combination of letters and numbers. GGRG terms these categories "liquid" domains because they are relatively easy to sell at prevailing market rates.

GGRG's latest report, produced by Founder Giuseppe Graziano in conjunction with Escrow.com, Intelium.com and ShortNames.com, showed continuing strength in the liquid domain category, including one record breaking performance. "2-letter .com domains registered a record $6 million in Escrow.com transactions, by far the best result since the publication of the report," the report began, adding "4-letter domains kept a consistent $4.8 million in turnover, followed by another strong quarter for the 3-letter .coms at $3.5 million. 3Ns and 4Ns also posted good quarters, respectively with $2.8 million and $1.3 million in Escrow.com sales."

The report also noted, "While Escrow.com did

GGRG Founder Giuseppe Graziano

not record any 2-number .com transactions, the other categories (5Ns, 2Cs and 3Cs) posted an aggregate of almost $1 million, respectively at $225,000, $143,000 and $562,000. The total amount of sales reported by ShortNames.com was $7.7 million, with 4,108 transactions."

GGRG reported that China is continuing to grow their market share of liquid domain names. For example, in the ever popular 3-letter .com segment Chinese owners now hold 32.69% of all domains in that category - well ahead of the U.S. at 24.11% (the report also breaks down geographic market share for all of the other liquid domain categories). You will  find much more data of interest in the latest analysis and if you sign up to receive the free quarterly updates at GGRG.com they will keep you abreast of how things continue to unfold in this category going forward.

Throughout the 2000s Sahar Sarid was a widely-known figure in the domain industry as an investor, developer, blogger and conference speaker. So well-known that we profiled him in a 2007 Cover Story. In this decade, amid rumors of questionable business practices, Sarid has rarely appeared in domain circles. However, he is now suddenly back in the news and not in a good way. 

West Palm Beach, Florida TV station WPTV is reporting that Sarid and his partners in the Mugshots.com website have been arrested on extortion, money laundering and identity theft charges filed by the California Attorney General's Office. WPTV reports Sarid was arrested at his South Florida home and booked into the Broward County Jail Wednesday (May 16). California officials plan to extradite him to that state for prosecution.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra

Sahar Sarid at the 2007 Domain 
Roundtable conference in Seattle.

issued a press release announcing charges of "extortion, money laundering, and identity theft" had been filed against four defendants who are allegedly behind the exploitative website Mugshots.com. The release said, "The website mines data from police and sheriffs' department websites to collect individuals' names, booking photos and charges, then republishes the information online without the individuals' knowledge or consent. Once subjects request that their booking photos be removed, they are routed to a secondary website called Unpublisharrest.com and charged a "de-publishing" fee to have the content removed. Mugshots.com does not remove criminal record information until a subject pays the fee. This is the case even if the subject had charges dismissed or had been arrested due to mistaken identity or law enforcement error. Those subjects who cannot pay the fee may subsequently be denied housing, employment, or other opportunities because their booking photo is readily available on the internet."

Becerra said, "This pay-for-removal scheme attempts to profit off of someone else's humiliation. Those who can't afford to pay into this scheme to have their information removed pay the price when they look for a job, housing, or try to build relationships with others. This is exploitation, plain and simple."

According to the press release, "The defendants named in the complaint are Sahar Sarid, Kishore Vidya Bhavnanie, Thomas Keesee, and David Usdan. They are the alleged owners and operators of Mugshots.com. Over a three-year period, the defendants extracted more than $64,000 in removal fees from approximately 175 individuals with billing addresses in California. Nationally, the defendants took more than $2 million in removal fees from approximately 5,703 individuals for the same period."

It is impossible to escape the irony of seeing Sarid now in need of the "service" Mugshots.com was selling.

Ever since  the only General Counsel they ever had, Phil Corwin, left the Internet Commerce Association (ICA) to accept a position at Verisign six months ago, the organization that protects domain owner rights has been searching for just the right person to fill the shoes Corwin had ably worn for ten years. Turns out they didn't have to look far. 

When Corwin left the ICA board convinced one of the industry's top attorneys, Zak Muscovitch, to fill in on an Interim basis and help with a search for Corwin's successor. Zak, who has was already a long-time ICA supporter, did the job so well the Board, after a unanimous vote, decided there was no need to look any further if Muscovitch would agree to drop the work "interim" from his title. He did and the ICA got their man.

A letter that went out to ICA members today noted that since Muscovitch agreed to fill in last fall, "the pace of the ICA's activities has accelerated, rapid progress has been made on UDRP advocacy, and Zak has quickly built productive relationships with many of the key players in the policy arena. If that was not enough, Zak also dove into the GDPR/Whois Accreditation process and took the lead role in drafting revisions that were adopted by the

ICA General Counsel Zak Muscovitch

Business Constituency and the Intellectual Property Constituency to give domain industry players the ability to maintain access to Whois data."

ICA Executive Director Kamila Sekiewicz added, "I have heard from many of you directly confirming that you prized Zak's work, communication style and the positive impact he’s had on the ICA. Your feedback helped to confirm to me and to the ICA’s Board that Zak is the right person for the job and that we'd like him to stay on as ICA's General Counsel. We are grateful that despite the disruption taking on the ICA General Counsel role has caused to his thriving legal practice, Zak has agreed to stay on as General Counsel."

When DomainInvesting.com's Eliot Silver (an ICA member) asked Muscovitch how he managed to handle his dual responsibilities so well Zak told him, "I have had to make room for more and ever increasing ICA work by turning down and referring some cases and files, and working much longer hours. It has been a challenge no doubt, and I am still finding the right balance between my law practice and the ICA work. But as they say, "If you want something done, ask a busy person!" In any event, it is an honor and a privilege to serve the ICA and its members. I am very happy that I have made this decision and am most grateful to the ICA Board and its members for entrusting me with this important work.”

Mind + Machines (MMX) - a new gTLD registry operator that administers 28 TLDs has acquired  ICM Registry LLC - another new gTLD operator with four adult related TLDs in its portfolio - .xxx, .porn, .sex and .adult. MMX (who is listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market under the symbol MMX.L) paid $10 million in cash and $31 million in newly issued stock (subject to ICANN approval) according to UK-based business news website ProactiveInvestors.co.uk. At the same time, that site reported MMX had its first profitable year in 2017, turning a $3.8 million profit on $14.3 million in total revenue. 

The MMX acquisition continues the consolidation trend we've been seeing in the new gTLD space. A press release we received

from ICM about today's deal said ICM said had attracted offers from several other new gTLD registry operators before accepting the MMX proposal. 

ICM's outgoing CEO, Stuart Lawley said, “I strongly believe ICM’s shareholders, customers and employees will be well served by this acquisition; MMX has a very dynamic management team. We received 4 offers in total for the business, some all cash and others a mixture of cash and stock. After lengthy, detailed negotiations and due diligence with the interested parties, the arrangement with MMX was clearly the best fit.”

Lawley will become the largest shareholder in MMX with a holding just over 15% and as part of the transaction, the five remaining senior managers of ICM (who will stay on with MMX) will all have meaningful stock holdings in MMX. Lawley said he is leaving to pursue blockchain based Age Verification business opportunities with his new business AVSecure.com.

By now many of you have heard the news that the extremely valuable France.com domain name that Jean-Noel Frydman has owned and operated a business on since 1994 had been removed from his Web.com account without notice and turned over to the French government. For years Frydman, who was born in France but lives in the U.S. and holds dual U.S.-French citizenship, operated a thriving business promoting French travel on the domain with France's blessing.  

That changed in 2015 when France decided they wanted the domain for themselves but apparently didn't want to pay anything for it, so they started a legal battle to try to get it from

Image from Bigstock

Frydman. This, even though there are multiple legal precedents (PuertoRico.com, Barcelona.com and MyrtleBeach.com to name just a few) establishing that anyone can own domain names that match countries, states, cities and other geographic locations - they are places, not trademarks. 

In September 2017 a French court ruled in favor of the French government (no surprise there) and armed with that order the government asked Web.com to transfer the name to them which, even though Frydman's business, Web.com and the operator of .com domains (Verisign) are all based in the United States, not France. Nothing happened until March 12, 2018 when Web.com is alleged to have taken France.com from Frydman's account, putting him out of business overnight, and transferred it to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.